Read from Time Extension:
Time Extension: From there, how did you originally get the job at Square in localisation?
Honeywood: So, Ken Narita, who was the head programmer, had hired me and said, 'Yep, I'm taking him.' He's going to be a Final Fantasy programmer. But then I suddenly got called back in, and the head of the US office turned up.
He said, 'We're thinking of setting up a localisation department. Would you set it up for us?' At the time, they wanted to set it up in HQ rather than America. And they asked me, 'Would you do that?' I told them, 'I don't know what localisation is,' but then he basically explained to me what the goals were and whatever. So that's where my whole life took a different direction.
Time Extension: Do you know why they wanted a programmer? Had they originally wanted you to use your programming skills, too?
Honeywood: That was part of it. With localisation, they wanted somebody who knew video games. They already had a translator, Michael Baskett, who was more of a movie guy. He was into war movie subtitling back in the day. So when he was working on video games, he wasn't really a video game player, which is what they really liked about me.
It was, 'Okay, we can get this bilingual guy, who's done localisation without realizing he's done localisation, and he can program. We can put him in any dev team, and he could localise the games for us.' So back then, the idea was rather than the original development team spending three months or whatever working on the foreign version, they'd hand the code over to this wonder boy programmer who would solve the localisation problem for them. I was naive at the time, so I just accepted, thinking that it would work, but I soon realized that wasn't going to be the case.
Time Extension: Am I right that another person joined you in setting up the localisation department?
Honeywood: Yes, Aiko [Ito]! The reason why she was in localisation was really ironic. She was raised in Japan, but she was from a Korean lineage.
Aiko had assisted Ted Woosley, who was the Square's main translator before Michael Baskett. So she had worked on games like Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, and all those old games. She did that because she was the only person inside the development team who happened to have some English, and also, because she was Korean. So, later on, they thought, 'We'll put her in the new international department,' so Aiko was suddenly thrown in with me; she didn't even know I was joining.
Suddenly, the head of the US office brought me in and told her to move seats and sit next to me, and we were put under the network department, because where else are you going to put your localisation? Our manager in the Japanese office was the head of the network department, and he was just like, 'What the hell am I doing with these two foreigners?'
By the time we were working together, Final Fantasy VII had just mastered, and it was too late to change anything. So I was just looking at the source code and the pre-release gameplay of Final Fantasy VII, and I was looking for stuff that I knew was a mistranslation or could be done better for later releases. So, for example, "PHS", which is the party management system, was actually a reference to a phone system in Japan, like a mobile phone system, but they hadn't translated it that way; they just kept it as PHS overseas. I was making these suggestions to feed back to the translator, but I kept being told that he's in the US.
Time Extension: I have heard that Xenogears was like a nightmare project for you. What are your memories of that project today?
Honeywood: You have to remember that the content was quite formidable: it's not only packed with references to Jungian and Freudian psychology, but it's also a game about killing god. At the time, I was a Jehovah's Witness, so that part of the subject matter was already kind of hitting my conscience, but some US staff were also scared about what the response would be. For instance, they wanted us to remove the word Church, with a capital, because it might appear to be the Catholic Church. So I was even having to go to the development team before the Japanese version launched, and I was telling them, 'Please tone down some of this stuff.'
Initially, Brian and Nobby were working on the project in the US, along with Michael Baskett. While this was going on, there were some other changes in the US office. As I said, Final Fantasy VII had sold crazy amounts, and I think Michael wanted a bit more respect inside the company, but the Japanese management wasn't having any of it. So there was a falling out that I wasn't fully aware of, and I wrote to Nobby to find out what was happening. He said, 'It sounds like Michael's quitting.' Although they had only finished the first batch of text to translate, both Brian and Nobby made it clear that, for various reasons, they wanted off the project at that point. We moved Brian onto Chocobo Dungeon 2, I believe. I let Nobby help out on some other projects that needed to be done (but I later brought him back on Xenogears to help with QA), and that's where I had to become a lot more hands-on with the translation myself.
Because I was in Japan, I didn't have access to English books, let alone German books, so I had to go to the National Library, where some of these foreign books were housed, to research these concepts and try to find out what they were in English. Remember, the internet was only just becoming a thing at Japanese companies back then. At that time, we had just gotten an intranet at the company, so we could email our American office, but we still didn't have fast data sharing. Even our QA bug reports had to be done by fax! We couldn't just go on Wikipedia and research some of this stuff, so, as you can imagine, it was a total nightmare!
In the end, I nearly killed myself on that title, and people knew it. People saw me sleeping in the office every night and coming up like a zombie. We got to the point where I hardly ever went home, and I was just trying to get that out. At that point, they realized, 'This guy really is passionate about our titles and cares about them.' So we're not giving it to some foreigner who will just turn around a shoddy translation.
Time Extension: Eventually, Enix merged with Square, and you found yourself working on the Dragon Quest series as well as Final Fantasy. What do you remember about the merger?
Honeywood: I had gotten word of the merger beforehand because while I was working on Final Fantasy XI, I got called into the CEO's office and they said, 'This is top secret, but we're merging with Enix. We want you to personally join the Enix side of the company and make sure the merger goes smoothly between the two teams.' I walked out of the room like, 'Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,' and I was sitting there trying to work on FFXI, knowing that there'll be an announcement within the coming days.
The buyout, as far as I'm aware, was because the movie flopped. Square had lost so much money, and there was nothing to save the company at that point. Enix came in and bought us out. But that was the problem. When two companies merge, you're going to have conflicts of culture, and I think Enix looked down on the Square side of things.
When we met with them, their attitude was, 'You guys were the ones that were bought out, so you guys are subservient to us,' and they wanted us to bow and scrape to them all the time. For instance, Yuji Horii-san only came in once a week for meetings. The rest of the office was smoke-free, but he was a smoker, so in one meeting room, everyone was allowed to smoke, and you basically had to bathe in the cloud of smoke and adjust to their style. I did my best to make it work, and at first, the Enix side acted like they really hated me and didn't necessarily treat me well. But I'd already gone through this before with the Square side, and working at other Japanese companies before that, so I was used to it by now.
Time Extension: I'm curious, how did you go about differentiating Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest when it came to localisation?
Honeywood: The big thing I wanted to do was British English to differentiate us from the American English used in Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy in the West was basically cyberpunk. You can get away with using American English even in sometimes classical settings, because it's got that cyber element. While Dragon Quest is more traditional fantasy. In fact, the original translations on the NES were sort of done in a faux-Shakespearean feel, even though it was American translators. They did throw in a few things, and they also renamed a lot of the names.
The development team wanted to change that, but I knew we needed to be careful because sometimes we're going to have references across games, and we need to keep the names consistent. So again, I needed to solve those types of issues. Because it was a comical, lighthearted fantasy, I really wanted to use British humour, which didn't fly with the American office; they couldn't understand it, and they really hated it.
Time Extension: Dragon Quest VIII was the first mainline game in the series to feature voices. How much did that factor into the localisation process?
Honeywood: That was my first time working with Level-5. I met with them, and they were really super helpful. They had experience with foreign games selling more than Japanese games, so they knew that Dragon Quest could finally sell more in the West than it does in Japan if we play this right. So they were totally on board when I asked, 'Can we add voices to a game? But Yuji Horii was adamant, 'No, we're not going to add voices to Dragon Quest.'
He said, 'Dragon Quest is a traditional old-school game. We don't need voices.' So we had to say, 'Even like Final Fantasy has voices. We've got to keep up with the times.' He basically signed off, just see how it went, with the idea being that if it doesn't work, we won't do it again, but then Dragon Quest 8 went out and sold really well. After that, [Koichi] Sugiyama, Akira Toriyama, and Yuji Horii met, the musicians and Sugiyama-san said, 'Adding voice to the game really makes it feel different. We should do that going forward.' So they totally turned around 180 degrees when they saw the success. And that's why, on Dragon Quest Swords, they added voices to the Japanese version of Dragon Quest for the first time.
Time Extension: What was it like working with Yuji Horii?
Honeywood: It was sometimes a bit odd. I remember I would suddenly get a text or a phone call from the company saying, "Oh, Horii-san wants to fly to Paris, can you accompany him?' I'd tell them, I've got work to do. Why am I having to fly to Paris? Is this for work?' And they'd answer, 'No, he just wants a holiday, and he wants a translator or interpreter to go with him.' I didn't even speak French.
Then another time it'd be like, 'Oh, he read the Da Vinci Code, so he wants to go to Scotland and see Rosslyn Chapel.' So he brought his daughter along with him and a few of the executives. The weird thing was, he always acted like he couldn't remember my name. He'd say, 'George, would you do this for me? Yeah, Harry, do that.' He just randomly used English names to refer to me. Even the Japanese people would say to me, 'He's a sadist, and you're a masochist. That's why you guys work together.’
What was nice, though, was years later, it got back to me when I left Square, and I was leaving Blizzard, and I was interviewing with Koei, and the CEO and the chairperson at Koei said, 'Oh yeah, you're the guy that Horii-san was talking about. He said to us that you're this great guy that he wished they had never left the company. He really respects you.' It was years later, but I finally got a compliment from those people. It's really funny how it all goes around.
Time Extension: From there, how did you originally get the job at Square in localisation?
Honeywood: So, Ken Narita, who was the head programmer, had hired me and said, 'Yep, I'm taking him.' He's going to be a Final Fantasy programmer. But then I suddenly got called back in, and the head of the US office turned up.
He said, 'We're thinking of setting up a localisation department. Would you set it up for us?' At the time, they wanted to set it up in HQ rather than America. And they asked me, 'Would you do that?' I told them, 'I don't know what localisation is,' but then he basically explained to me what the goals were and whatever. So that's where my whole life took a different direction.
Time Extension: Do you know why they wanted a programmer? Had they originally wanted you to use your programming skills, too?
Honeywood: That was part of it. With localisation, they wanted somebody who knew video games. They already had a translator, Michael Baskett, who was more of a movie guy. He was into war movie subtitling back in the day. So when he was working on video games, he wasn't really a video game player, which is what they really liked about me.
It was, 'Okay, we can get this bilingual guy, who's done localisation without realizing he's done localisation, and he can program. We can put him in any dev team, and he could localise the games for us.' So back then, the idea was rather than the original development team spending three months or whatever working on the foreign version, they'd hand the code over to this wonder boy programmer who would solve the localisation problem for them. I was naive at the time, so I just accepted, thinking that it would work, but I soon realized that wasn't going to be the case.
Time Extension: Am I right that another person joined you in setting up the localisation department?
Honeywood: Yes, Aiko [Ito]! The reason why she was in localisation was really ironic. She was raised in Japan, but she was from a Korean lineage.
Aiko had assisted Ted Woosley, who was the Square's main translator before Michael Baskett. So she had worked on games like Super Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, and all those old games. She did that because she was the only person inside the development team who happened to have some English, and also, because she was Korean. So, later on, they thought, 'We'll put her in the new international department,' so Aiko was suddenly thrown in with me; she didn't even know I was joining.
Suddenly, the head of the US office brought me in and told her to move seats and sit next to me, and we were put under the network department, because where else are you going to put your localisation? Our manager in the Japanese office was the head of the network department, and he was just like, 'What the hell am I doing with these two foreigners?'
By the time we were working together, Final Fantasy VII had just mastered, and it was too late to change anything. So I was just looking at the source code and the pre-release gameplay of Final Fantasy VII, and I was looking for stuff that I knew was a mistranslation or could be done better for later releases. So, for example, "PHS", which is the party management system, was actually a reference to a phone system in Japan, like a mobile phone system, but they hadn't translated it that way; they just kept it as PHS overseas. I was making these suggestions to feed back to the translator, but I kept being told that he's in the US.
Time Extension: I have heard that Xenogears was like a nightmare project for you. What are your memories of that project today?
Honeywood: You have to remember that the content was quite formidable: it's not only packed with references to Jungian and Freudian psychology, but it's also a game about killing god. At the time, I was a Jehovah's Witness, so that part of the subject matter was already kind of hitting my conscience, but some US staff were also scared about what the response would be. For instance, they wanted us to remove the word Church, with a capital, because it might appear to be the Catholic Church. So I was even having to go to the development team before the Japanese version launched, and I was telling them, 'Please tone down some of this stuff.'
Initially, Brian and Nobby were working on the project in the US, along with Michael Baskett. While this was going on, there were some other changes in the US office. As I said, Final Fantasy VII had sold crazy amounts, and I think Michael wanted a bit more respect inside the company, but the Japanese management wasn't having any of it. So there was a falling out that I wasn't fully aware of, and I wrote to Nobby to find out what was happening. He said, 'It sounds like Michael's quitting.' Although they had only finished the first batch of text to translate, both Brian and Nobby made it clear that, for various reasons, they wanted off the project at that point. We moved Brian onto Chocobo Dungeon 2, I believe. I let Nobby help out on some other projects that needed to be done (but I later brought him back on Xenogears to help with QA), and that's where I had to become a lot more hands-on with the translation myself.
Because I was in Japan, I didn't have access to English books, let alone German books, so I had to go to the National Library, where some of these foreign books were housed, to research these concepts and try to find out what they were in English. Remember, the internet was only just becoming a thing at Japanese companies back then. At that time, we had just gotten an intranet at the company, so we could email our American office, but we still didn't have fast data sharing. Even our QA bug reports had to be done by fax! We couldn't just go on Wikipedia and research some of this stuff, so, as you can imagine, it was a total nightmare!
In the end, I nearly killed myself on that title, and people knew it. People saw me sleeping in the office every night and coming up like a zombie. We got to the point where I hardly ever went home, and I was just trying to get that out. At that point, they realized, 'This guy really is passionate about our titles and cares about them.' So we're not giving it to some foreigner who will just turn around a shoddy translation.
Time Extension: Eventually, Enix merged with Square, and you found yourself working on the Dragon Quest series as well as Final Fantasy. What do you remember about the merger?
Honeywood: I had gotten word of the merger beforehand because while I was working on Final Fantasy XI, I got called into the CEO's office and they said, 'This is top secret, but we're merging with Enix. We want you to personally join the Enix side of the company and make sure the merger goes smoothly between the two teams.' I walked out of the room like, 'Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,' and I was sitting there trying to work on FFXI, knowing that there'll be an announcement within the coming days.
The buyout, as far as I'm aware, was because the movie flopped. Square had lost so much money, and there was nothing to save the company at that point. Enix came in and bought us out. But that was the problem. When two companies merge, you're going to have conflicts of culture, and I think Enix looked down on the Square side of things.
When we met with them, their attitude was, 'You guys were the ones that were bought out, so you guys are subservient to us,' and they wanted us to bow and scrape to them all the time. For instance, Yuji Horii-san only came in once a week for meetings. The rest of the office was smoke-free, but he was a smoker, so in one meeting room, everyone was allowed to smoke, and you basically had to bathe in the cloud of smoke and adjust to their style. I did my best to make it work, and at first, the Enix side acted like they really hated me and didn't necessarily treat me well. But I'd already gone through this before with the Square side, and working at other Japanese companies before that, so I was used to it by now.
Time Extension: I'm curious, how did you go about differentiating Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest when it came to localisation?
Honeywood: The big thing I wanted to do was British English to differentiate us from the American English used in Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy in the West was basically cyberpunk. You can get away with using American English even in sometimes classical settings, because it's got that cyber element. While Dragon Quest is more traditional fantasy. In fact, the original translations on the NES were sort of done in a faux-Shakespearean feel, even though it was American translators. They did throw in a few things, and they also renamed a lot of the names.
The development team wanted to change that, but I knew we needed to be careful because sometimes we're going to have references across games, and we need to keep the names consistent. So again, I needed to solve those types of issues. Because it was a comical, lighthearted fantasy, I really wanted to use British humour, which didn't fly with the American office; they couldn't understand it, and they really hated it.
Time Extension: Dragon Quest VIII was the first mainline game in the series to feature voices. How much did that factor into the localisation process?
Honeywood: That was my first time working with Level-5. I met with them, and they were really super helpful. They had experience with foreign games selling more than Japanese games, so they knew that Dragon Quest could finally sell more in the West than it does in Japan if we play this right. So they were totally on board when I asked, 'Can we add voices to a game? But Yuji Horii was adamant, 'No, we're not going to add voices to Dragon Quest.'
He said, 'Dragon Quest is a traditional old-school game. We don't need voices.' So we had to say, 'Even like Final Fantasy has voices. We've got to keep up with the times.' He basically signed off, just see how it went, with the idea being that if it doesn't work, we won't do it again, but then Dragon Quest 8 went out and sold really well. After that, [Koichi] Sugiyama, Akira Toriyama, and Yuji Horii met, the musicians and Sugiyama-san said, 'Adding voice to the game really makes it feel different. We should do that going forward.' So they totally turned around 180 degrees when they saw the success. And that's why, on Dragon Quest Swords, they added voices to the Japanese version of Dragon Quest for the first time.
Time Extension: What was it like working with Yuji Horii?
Honeywood: It was sometimes a bit odd. I remember I would suddenly get a text or a phone call from the company saying, "Oh, Horii-san wants to fly to Paris, can you accompany him?' I'd tell them, I've got work to do. Why am I having to fly to Paris? Is this for work?' And they'd answer, 'No, he just wants a holiday, and he wants a translator or interpreter to go with him.' I didn't even speak French.
Then another time it'd be like, 'Oh, he read the Da Vinci Code, so he wants to go to Scotland and see Rosslyn Chapel.' So he brought his daughter along with him and a few of the executives. The weird thing was, he always acted like he couldn't remember my name. He'd say, 'George, would you do this for me? Yeah, Harry, do that.' He just randomly used English names to refer to me. Even the Japanese people would say to me, 'He's a sadist, and you're a masochist. That's why you guys work together.’
What was nice, though, was years later, it got back to me when I left Square, and I was leaving Blizzard, and I was interviewing with Koei, and the CEO and the chairperson at Koei said, 'Oh yeah, you're the guy that Horii-san was talking about. He said to us that you're this great guy that he wished they had never left the company. He really respects you.' It was years later, but I finally got a compliment from those people. It's really funny how it all goes around.